I’m going to put something else up in this webspace (jeremyprivett.com) which will probably be better than a blog. My goal is to aggregate all of my web presence into a single feed and present it here, as well as details on projects I’m working on and what I’m doing on the work-side of life, be it with Highwinds (as much as I can reveal, anyway), Omega Vortex, or otherwise.

Thanks to all of you who followed along and kept me company while I was actually doing this. You all can find me on other places on the net, if you want. I’m @jeremyprivett on Twitter. I still hang out on Anfiniti and it’s pretty easy to find me on Facebook.

Well, I was going to put a list of update sites that you need here, except I still haven’t found them all. I can’t seem to get all of them that you need and because the resources document is just flat-wrong, this process is pretty much just dead in the water, at this point. It is absolutely pointless to install Zend Studio as a standalone editor when I want to use Eclipse for other things besides PHP (sometimes two different languages at the same time).

I think I’m done with Zend Studio. The Eclipse move frustrates me to no end. Prior to now, I’ve absolutely hated Eclipse with a passion. I’ve tried to work with it, several times. I just don’t like the workflows, the memory hogging tendencies, the fact that it slows to an absolute crawl when trying to do anything in a project larger than a handful of files. It’s ridiculous.

I’ve been giving NetBeans a shot for the past couple of days and it’s pretty decent, but it’s missing something that I can’t really place my finger on. An IDE that doesn’t suck and has support for multiple languages would be a killer app. Aptana seems like they’re on the right track, but there’s that Eclipse dependency that irks me again. I’m not above giving Eclipse another shot and trying to make it work, if someone can come along and make an IDE worth using.

As much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft owns the land of development tools, hands down. I love Visual Studio 2008. If VS.PHP didn’t suck and there was good support for CPython (not IronPython!) available, I think I’d use it for everything. Maybe more language plugins for Visual Studio will start to appear. Even if they were commercial plugins, it would still be worth it, as long as they were solid language support that properly utilized Visual Studio’s features. Even just being half as awesome and intuitive as working in C# in VS would be leagues beyond pretty much any other IDE I’ve used, so far.

… it’s kind of sad, really.

For those unfamiliar with the game, one of the game modes is the “Tower of Souls” which features a 60 floor tower that you can ascend or descend. Ascending takes it 1 - 4 floors at a time with pauses in between to select different characters for the next set of floors and gives you information on the treasures available and whatnot. Descending is a non-stop run from the top to the bottom and you only get to select two characters for the entire run. So far, we’ve made it to the last two sets of floors for the ascent and have  gone 25 consecutive floors in the descent.

The tower is technically supposed to be a single-player game mode, but in the areas where we’re allowed to select multiple characters we’ve been selecting one for me and one for him and when it comes time to switch character’s we’ll quickly pass the controller over to the other person. It’s actually been quite fun and helpful, because we’re both proficient in different styles of play, so when one thing isn’t working we can pass it over to one another and see if they have better luck.

Maybe we’ll get through the last two sets of floors soon. It’s probably a long way off before we can even hope to manage to accomplish the descent. Unless we do it the cheap way and find a character who we can successfully spam the same attacks over and over again or something.

I’ll be maintaining a list of planned articles in the sidebar and adding a category for the articles so they can be easily accessed from the header. If possible, I’d like to write solely based on reader-submitted ideas, so please get a few ideas in comments so I can start deciding what I want to write about first. Thanks in advance for all of your suggestions!

Ruzena helps me again. Somewhat. Her roommate’s dad was apparently selling a 1997 BMW 528i and was willing to give me quite an astounding deal on it. I have the car now and we went to the DMV yesterday to get everything official. Title transfer, License transfer, plates, etc. I also setup my car insurance in the morning, but for some reason it doesn’t seem like the payment actually took and I’ll have to call Progressive to see what’s going on with that. It’s not letting me print off the temporary insurance cards, so I’m assuming the policy isn’t activated. Can’t really drive without insurance, so I need to get that worked out soon.

The only real problem with the car when I first saw it was a hot-start issue with the starter where it wouldn’t start while the car was hot. He got the starter replaced and it hasn’t had a problem, so far. A few other minor issues but nothing show-stopping. I won’t have to dump a ton of money into it upfront, but there’s certainly a few minor annoyances that I’ll want to fix over time.

Here’s hoping that all goes well with the car and I can get my insurance issue worked out soon.

I think what I’m going to do is try to further reduce the number of categories so the header looks a little cleaner and actually start using tags in my posts. We’ll see how that goes. So, this is me trying to start blogging again. I even installed the new version of Windows Live Writer so I can write entries without actually having to visit the site. That was a lot of my problem for the past couple of months. I just forgot this thing was here.

I’m sure I’ll (try to) come up with plenty of interesting things to blog about, now that I’m out in Phoenix. Here’s to more posting in the future.

At the beginning of October, I got a chance to go visit Ruzena again. As always, we had a really good time. I was in Houghton for Homecoming and got to be there for all of the festivities, including the Homecoming Banquet and Dance. I think the food was better last year, but it was still good. The dance didn’t quite go “as planned.” The first half was kind of lame, so we ended up migrating to the basement where a group of us had our own little mini-dance, which was far more entertaining. Ruzena and I got to watch our first fireworks show together and became “siamese twins” because we were huddled so closely together because of how cold it was outside.

Omega Vortex has been feeling the situation with the economy with potential clients bailing, citing economic problems. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to look for another job, and I believe things are looking good on that front. I’ve received extremely positive responses, but a few details are still being worked out, so I won’t say more than that for fear of jinxing things. Omega Vortex isn’t closing, we’re just going to be cutting back like any other company does, during a recession. We’re closing extraneous divisions in an effort to concentrate more on our core business. Because of this, we’ve closed the website temporarily because it was only up to facilitate some of the divisions we’re closing. This is giving us an opportunity to go through with our redesign plan and get a new look in place for the re-launch. We’ll have more news on that front sometime soon.

I’ve been doing a lot more gaming again, lately. I’ve given some thought to cross-posting some game reviews on this blog and the blog at Anfiniti. I’m not exactly up-to-date with the latest games and would also be doing some retro-reviews, so my current hitlist consists of Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty: World at War, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge, and a few other things. In case I’ve never mentioned it before, I’m always interested in playing games with new people. You can find me on Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam. For Xbox Live: Atrophius, for Xfire: atrophius, and for Steam: siguel. Maybe I’ll have a PSN name or a Wii Friend Code to share, sometime in the not too distant future.

Things have been extraordinarily dull, lately. I should be moving to Phoenix soon, so I think I’ll start taking opportunities to get out more and explore. I think I’m missing out on a world of inspiration because I rarely leave my desk. Maybe hanging out with Dutch again will get me back on my feet and moving forward. After almost two years of living with or around people that actually do what I do and are willing and capable of having ideas and such bounced off of them, I think my creativity started to die off when I lost that immediate access to people like me. Programming and all of the processes surrounding programming and software development is exciting to me, except when it’s not. When I don’t have people that I can talk to about it pretty frequently, I usually end up resorting to more reading than coding to try and make up for that lack of interaction. Hopefully, being in a new work environment will help.

That’s about all, for now. If I stop letting myself be lazy or distracted, I’ll blog more. Maybe even about interesting things. We’ll just have to see …

I’m an avid user of Pandora. I love the service and I’ve been a premium subscriber since 2006. I have a soft music station that has been meticulously crafted to near-perfection which gives me some of the best music to sleep or work to that I think I could ever ask for. For those of you who know me, you also know that I’m quite a fan of harder types of music. Groups like Blind Guardian, Iron Maiden, Sonata Arctica, and the like. I also have a station for this type of music, which hasn’t quite been crafted and listened to as much as the other station. Over the past week, though, it has produced some amazing things for me. I’ve found three songs in particular this way that made me just stop and listen. That doesn’t happen very often.

I’m going to share these with you, because I just think they’re that awesome. May not be your thing, though. If not, that’s fine. We have different tastes. This is also so I can put them somewhere that I can access them easier when I want to show them to someone else.

First up is Still Alive by Nocturnal Rites.

Next is Entering Eternity by Falconer.

And finally, we have Where Have The Angels Gone by Russell Allen & Jorn Lande.

I abruptly moved out of my apartment Saturday after quietly absorbing and dealing with all of the crap that I’ve taken over the course of the past few months. I pretty much knew that this was going to happen eventually after I returned from my trip to NY back in July. When the roles were reversed and I was actually doing a lot better than I am now, financially, I went out of my way to make sure that we had plenty to eat and drink in the apartment. We had plenty of food for quite a while and there wasn’t any of this “every man for himself” I’m gonna go get some food, but eff you, you can have a box of noodles garbage that’s been going on for a while now.

Scott, on a regular basis, would also do what he calls “joking” with people. Where he looks for, finds, and pushes every button he can in order to get under your skin. And he quite often takes things too far. Way too far. Far enough where a “STFU” would’ve been warranted well before where he finally stops. This is anything from calling Jessica (his fiancee) a bitch for no reason (none of you can ever understand how much that kind of thing pisses me off) to literally starting fights with people for no reason, sometimes in the presence of other people.

If he ever doesn’t get his way, he throws the biggest fit of just about anyone I’ve ever seen in my life. Throwing things, calling people “gay” or “fag” or whatever. He’s often like a ticking time bomb and will explode on anyone, regardless of whether they’re related to whatever his current problem is, regardless of whether what he’s exploding about is even something worth getting that worked up about. I’ve been told that I have anger problems, but I can noticeably keep my anger in far better check than he can.

But, back to the groceries issue. This is the real meat of why I left. The other stuff is small potatoes compared to this. I have actually lost weight over the past couple of months, due to his inability to properly stock the apartment with food, even when he has money. I’ve never complained about buying groceries when I did, but there was no reciprocation. Whenever a trip to the store was made, the amount of food that actually came into the apartment was just enough for one, maybe two meals and then we were back to this “everyone for themselves” crap where they would often just bring fast food home without even thinking of me.

I don’t even want to hear any of the “money is tight” arguments, because that is complete and absolute horsecrap. Scott has had plenty of money to buy an Xbox, a $125 phone, and he and Jessica have eaten out at countless places. Where are the freaking groceries? I went above and beyond when the two of them were seriously tight on money, when Scott quit his job working at Planet for a while, but nobody seems to give a crap about that when the roles are reversed.

Now, this type of a rant wouldn’t be right without a reflection on what I personally did wrong. It was brought up during our conversation this evening, yes I could’ve taken on a part-time job to help with the food myself as well as bills. There were three reasons that I didn’t. For starters, I was so irritated that there still hadn’t been a proper groceries contribution that I wasn’t willing to go spend money on food just to have it be eaten without any thanks or acknowledgement. Second, I forgot that Scott knew the manager of the place across the street, which would’ve been an extremely convenient place to work and would’ve interfered with my other obligations the least. Third, there’s a lot more to what I do than just programming. This isn’t just some thing where we do little programming tasks for people, this is a full-fledged business. And one that I have to manage alone, currently. This includes the majority of all customer interaction that needs to occur during business hours. Just because you don’t know what I’m doing (if it’s not programming), doesn’t mean that I’m not doing anything. For homework, look up the term “sweat equity”.

Also, the way that I just abruptly took off wasn’t really a good idea. The reason this happened the way that it did was because something inside me had snapped the previous evening. Knowing that I didn’t have any money and that there was no food in the apartment, Scott looked dead at me and asked “What are you eating this weekend?” Well, what do you think there, chuckles?

I believe that the way the rent structure and “separate living spaces” arrangements that the apartment complex set forth have a lot to do with it, psychologically. Because most things were entirely separate, it encouraged the “every man for himself” mentality that was often seen. Scott not paying his rent wouldn’t affect me, and me not paying mine wouldn’t affect him. Except, that it does. Scott wouldn’t physically get evicted if I didn’t pay my rent, but it does put a strain on him financially, now that I’m gone.

He apparently was under the assumption that I was trying to just get out of my financial obligations, though. To the point where he shut my phone off (I was on his family plan, because it was cheaper for all of us), though I believe he did that mostly because he was angry. I sent him text messages during the day Saturday while I was trying to work out how much I owed for this month, for the sole reason that I intended on getting him what he needed to try and ease the financial strain on him. Granted, he didn’t know that, which is why he’s pissed, thus going back to it being a bad idea for me to have left so abruptly. It’ll be annoying not having the phone number that all of my business contacts have for me anymore, but I guess that was his way of getting back at me for “screwing him” as he put it.

Maybe when he calms down he’ll realize that I’m not trying to screw him. I just want to freaking eat. And I couldn’t do that there, so I left. If you made it this far, there’s one last thing that I want to say.

I love Scott like a brother. He’s family and I know that I hurt him because of the way things went, but no matter what I did to try and make him aware of when he either took things too far (and hurt peoples’ feelings, not just mine) or was inconsiderate about things like food, it didn’t change things. I started storing those feelings up and not showing them until it finally got to one critical moment and I just snapped. I’m sorry people got hurt, but I have feelings too. And a stomach. One that especially needs to be filled, because I already look sickly enough as it is.

That’s what all of this boils down to. Nothing else I tried worked, so I had to do something that was absolutely sure to get everyone’s attention. I’m not out to screw anyone, and I want to make sure that those who need the help, get it. I just couldn’t live in the conditions where someone kept “playing” and taking things too far and I only ever got a real meal once a week, sometimes less than that.